


Wings of Soul

by FoxofSpades



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:16:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxofSpades/pseuds/FoxofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Purgatory got deep into the core of what you were.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wings of Soul

Dean snarled, slamming a vampire into the ground.

“Where’s the angel?” he rasped. The thing laughed in his face and strained towards him, and he cut its head off swiftly.

The hardest part was getting them to talk.

He contemplated this as he walked over to the third (the second was already dead), and twisted its arm behind its back.

“Where?” he asked again, pressing the knife just deep enough into its neck.

“Where the sun shines,” it rasped. Dean closed his eyes, ears still open for sounds of attackers from behind, and breathed deep. He would not cry or shout or scream. He had managed not to so far. He could not show weakness here.

Yet still a bone-deep weariness filled him. He slit the thing’s throat and didn’t look back.

Purgatory was, in a word, relentless. There were the monsters that retained human form, and there were the monsters that retain their earth-monster form. And then there were the monsters that have been there a long, long time, until their forms grew truer and truer and more reflective of their basic nature.

Such was the smog-wolf-steel creature that assaulted Dean sometime in the future (there was no concrete time here), having sniffed after his desperate trail of bodies. It slashed and stabbed at the hunter with ten whip-claws and a tail like lightening, and Dean didn’t know how he was surviving. It pounced and he rolled with it, and they were locked in their fight for length of what passed for time, in silence and drear. It could have been a year, or a century, or a second.

But Dean eventually got his crude weapon under something sensitive, and the creature whined and lashed as he pinned it with its own claws.

“Where’s the angel?” he growled. The thing glared at him without eyes, and he asked again. “WHERE’S THE ANGEL?!” The thing’s tail whipped up, and it slashed itself across the middle.

Soaked in black gunk, Dean moved on.

He had a routine down. Fight whatever found him, ask them the question, kill them. None ever responded.

Until one did.

“Where’s the angel?” Dean asked. His voice was weary by now, gravely as it had never been before. The creature, a small thing of glowing light and blood red teeth, spit at him. It replied: “Where’s the human?” before sinking into the ground.

“I’m the human,” Dean said aloud. A black dog leapt at him, and he lost the thought in a tangle of teeth and claws.

“Where’s the angel?” he asked it as he twisted its neck. It barked and growled and he slit it open.

And then came an onslaught. They were ghosts—not his ghosts but kiddy ghosts, with flowing robes and eyeholes and all. Except they were a deep, mean purple and wielded themselves as weapons, and beat down on Dean like a rockslide, until he was fighting blind by blood in his eyes and could taste it. Then the calling started.

“Where’s the human?” they howled. “Where’s the humanhumanhuman?”

They beat their voice drums in a tornado around Dean, till he was crouched down and holding his ears. Till something burst inside him. Till something exploded.

“I’m the human!” he screamed at them, finally, when some light in his center flared out around. “I AM THE HUMAN!” He swung up with his stick and cleaved one ghost in two, emitting something fluorescent and radioactive. “I’m the human,” he chanted.  Three more fell from exposure, and he grabbed the last by the neck of its long, long form. “I am the human. WHERE IS MY ANGEL?”

“My angel,” the thing whispered. Dean snarled in its face and his aura burned its mauve skin, and he flew.

Purgatory got deep into the core of what you were. Monsters were monstrous, mutated, and malevolent, deformed forms and beasts that terrify hell.

Dean wasn’t a monster. He was human and a vessel-body-soul that had gone through so many deaths and lives that it didn’t know what it was anymore. Purgatory knew, though. Dean’s soul grew wings—horrible, beautiful, deadly wings-and he burned the very trees of the dimension.

He seared the air as he screamed towards the angel, locked on at last. Monsters and abominations and rancid souls were battering the shining beacon that Castiel was in purgatory—a sitting duck, the light of a candle to moon-sick moths. There were hundreds, thousands, and Dean could see his angel in the center, fighting with the weariness of a thousand million years of battle, and almost defeat.

It was good, then, that Dean landed amid the horde of them all and yelled fury and thunder, swung with his weapon and slayed, smote, a thousand. They evaporated and turned to dust and were buried and incinerated, and he fought the ones that were left until there weren’t any more.

“Dean.”

There were no more. There was only the human and the angel.

Dean turned to Castiel. The angel was on the ground now and gazing at him slackly, disbelievingly. His blade had fallen to the ground along with his hands.

Dean experienced a moment of soul-flare, then loped over to Castiel. He grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him gently, then roughly, then crushed him to his chest. He shoved his face into Castiel’s neck and breathed him in, clawed his back and felt Castiel do the same. He crashed them to the ground and stretched on top of him, closing in on the angel with painful tightness.

“Dean.” Dean snarled and dug his fingers into Castiel’s trenchcoat and pressed down onto him.

“My angel,” he rasped into his skin. “Cas.”

“Dean.”

“Say something else goddammit.”

“My human.”

 

 


End file.
